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Topic: Using a WD TV Live HD Media Player as a Media Director (Read 5506 times)

Has anyone had any success in integrating a WD TV Live HD Media Player into a LinuxMCE network? Found a model WDBAAN0000NBK-00 at Costco for about $100 and was hoping that I could use it as a Media Director.

I can access the DCECore computer and view the pictures, but not play any movies "No Supported Media"

It won't play any of the movies that I have copied to the core because of the .dvd extension. When I enter any of my DVD Movies folders it displays 'No Media Found' or wording similar to that. It will play items recorded by MythTV because they have a .mpg extension.

I am not up to speed on using it as a UPnP client of the core. If you have a link I could read after work, that would be great!

Now, the WD TV Live does have the ability to become a file server on the network with the addition of an external hard drive, but I wouldn't be able to use the storage because any movie I put there from the MCE won't be watchable on the little device. Grr.

But then I would have to go through and rename everything AND update the database. For 150+ movies and growing, no thank you. Since LinuxMCE rips to the hard drive as a .dvd, that's what I have to work with.

Spending a few hours on this I have been reading up on the UPnP Server (MediaTomb) built into LinuxMCE and trying to wrap my (apparently very thick) head around it.

Found the admin page, selected file system, told it to import my /home/public/data folder per another post from these forums and now the content shows up, all of it. Flickr pictures as .jpg's look like pictures, MythTV shows recorded as .mpg's play without a problem. But, on my WD TV Live the .tnj's don't display, the .dvd.id3 and .dvd.keys.tar.gz won't play. To make this work I need to figure out how to not import the three attributes to the left, and set the transcoding to allow a .dvd (LinuxMCE ripped ISO) to stream to my WD TV Live in a format it understands. I might try putting my laptop on the MCE internal network and see what I can pickup from it (KDE 3.5.9 on Debian Lenny).

I might just be spinning my wheels trying to get this to work but with as many units as the local Costco had, I hope not.

According to this information from WD knowledge base, the player can play DVD ISO but via samba:

Quote

Problem:When browsing the WD network drives as media servers through the User Interface of the WD TV Live Media Player, ISO files are not viewable.

Cause:When searching for videos to view from WD network drives through the WD TV Live Media Player, there are two options: Media Servers and Samba Servers. If you attempt to search for and play ISO files through the Media Server, you won't be able to play them. The Media Server uses Twonky Media to play its files. That's because it's DLNA compliant; and no DLNA Compliant media server, such as Twonky Media, plays ISO files.

Solution:In order to play the ISO files, you will need to search for them through the Samba Server. Then you should be able to view them.

I understand about the different file extensions not being live content (.id3 .dvd.id3 .dvd.tar.gz). They showed up on the MediaTomb File List.

Moving the WD TV Live to a different network, I was able to access a windows share and verify the ability play both the .mpg's and .iso's from it. When playing a .dvd I was not offered the DVD menu's. So, renaming all LinuxMCE .dvd's to .iso's would make this a more usable $100 machine. But I shouldn't have to. I shouldn't have to hack my server to make this device happy.

Along comes UPnP.

From what I am reading on the MediaTomb UPnP server is that when a device connects it is presented with a list of known media. When you select something from the menu, the server is suppose to begin streaming it to you. I could be off-base on my interpretation of this.

When you are importing media into the core the updatemedia script should be able to update the UPnP database (assuming MedaTomb / UPnP = Enabled).

When the client requests something the server (again, assuming MediaTomb / UPnP = Enabled) should be preset to transcode the .dvd's into their basic streams for really stupid devices similar to the one I purchased from Costco.

This is probably the wrong forum to pursue this thread, and an over-simplification of what needs to be done to support this. Not being a programmer, I will continue reading and studying what I can find to see if a solution can be put together.

While researching this question, I stumbled across a file in the /etc/mediatomb folder on my core called config.xml.dpkg-dist that looked like it was already setup for <name>LinuxMCE via MediaTomb</name>. I have made a backup of the original working config.xml and replaced with the found file. I will post my results.